Explore Rabbit Holes
Pick a rabbit hole.
Self-contained explorations, one concept at a time. Interactive where the topic earns it (live mempool, real difficulty countdowns, actual unit converters). Sourced everywhere. Fall down a hole, come out understanding something well.
Money
What makes it money?
Bitcoin Units
BTC, sats, mBTC, uBTC, Finney. Which unit to use, when, and why there are so many of them.
The Supply Schedule
21 million, forever. Here's how the math works, and why it is so hard to change.
Halvings
Every 210,000 blocks, the new-Bitcoin tap halves. Why, when, and what happens after.
How It Works
What actually happens when you use it?
Mining
Hash, nonce, target. The simplest hard problem in the world, and why it secures more than a trillion dollars.
Key Space
2^256 possible private keys. Trying them all would keep every computer on Earth busy for far longer than the universe has existed.
UTXOs
Bitcoin does not have balances. It has UTXOs. Once you see them, you can not unsee them.
The Mempool
Where transactions wait before they are real. The auction-house buffer between you and a block.
Lightning Routing
The Lightning Network is a graph. Sending a payment is finding a path through it. Here is how routing actually works.
How Taproot Actually Works
One key, two doors. How a Taproot output is built, why every one looks the same until it is spent, what Schnorr signatures changed, what Tapscript left open for the future, and what has actually been done with it since 2021, inscriptions included.
Which Coins Does Your Wallet Spend?
Your wallet does not have a balance. It has a bag of coins, and every payment starts by choosing which to spend. What that choice costs today, what it costs later, what it tells a chain analyst, and how the reference wallet decides, with four algorithms and one score.
Quindecillions: Why Nobody Can Stumble on Your Bitcoin
After a vanity address search, readers ask whether the address already had coins in it and how many wallets the search found on the way. Every Bitcoin address is a drawer. There are about 1.5 x 10^48 of them, 57 million hold coins, and no search on record has landed on a funded one by chance. The same arithmetic is why nobody has to register a key before using it.
The Time Warp: How Lying About the Time Could Break Bitcoin's Difficulty
A seam in Bitcoin's 2009 code would let a miner with most of the hash rate drive difficulty to its minimum within weeks, in under six with all of it. It has been used on other coins and planted once on testnet, never used on Bitcoin, and the fix is written and waiting for a soft fork.
Also on this shelf: Use It Once: Why Reusing a Bitcoin Address Is Dangerous
Custody and Privacy
How do I hold it safely and privately?
Seed Backup Strategies
Twelve words is your wallet. Lose them and you lose your bitcoin. Here is how serious people back them up.
Mt. Gox to FTX: The Custody Graveyard
A decade of crypto custodians that lost their customers' coins, from Mt. Gox to FTX, and the honest case for holding your own keys instead.
Privacy on Bitcoin: What Works and What Doesn't
Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous. How chain analysis actually traces coins, where your real name attaches to the ledger, what the 2024 CoinJoin shutdowns changed, and the defenses that still work.
Use It Once: Why Reusing a Bitcoin Address Is Dangerous
One bitcoin in four sits at an address that was spent from and then paid again. What a reused address gives away, to whom, why it keeps happening eighteen years after the whitepaper said not to, and how to stop without rushing.
Brain Wallets: Why a Passphrase You Made Up Is a Key Someone Can Guess
A brain wallet turns a phrase you made up into a Bitcoin private key, and since at least 2013 programs have guessed such phrases and emptied the wallets. In February 2014 James D'Angelo funded three of them on video. The chain shows what happened to his coins and to the famous phrases, and the best-known site closed in 2015.
Also on this shelf: Quantum and Bitcoin, Which Coins Does Your Wallet Spend?, Quindecillions: Why Nobody Can Stumble on Your Bitcoin
Who Decides
Who changes the rules, and how?
Decentralization
What 'decentralized' actually means, where Bitcoin sits on the spectrum, and how the network has defeated takeover attempts without anyone in charge.
The Block Size War
The 2015-2017 fight over Bitcoin's block size limit, from Bitcoin XT to the UASF to the forks that split away, and how it settled who actually controls the rules.
The BIP Process
How an idea becomes a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, what the editors actually control, why most proposals die, and how the ones that matter get activated - including the covenant activation fight underway in 2026.
Also on this shelf: How Taproot Actually Works, The 2013 Chain Fork, The Time Warp: How Lying About the Time Could Break Bitcoin's Difficulty
History
What happened, and what changed after?
The Inflation Bug Postmortem
August 15, 2010: someone created 184 billion BTC out of thin air. Five hours later, it was fixed. Here is the full story.
The 2013 Chain Fork
On 11 March 2013 a software upgrade split Bitcoin into two chains. Developers, pool operators and exchanges argued it out in a public chat room and put it back together in under eight hours. This is the log, with the timestamps.
Also on this shelf: Mt. Gox to FTX: The Custody Graveyard, The Block Size War, Rat Poison, Tulips and a Pet Rock: Everything Bitcoin's Been Called (so far), Brain Wallets: Why a Passphrase You Made Up Is a Key Someone Can Guess
Hard Questions
The strongest objections, including where the critics are right.
Quantum and Bitcoin
A real threat on a slow timeline. What a large quantum computer could break, which coins are exposed, and how Bitcoin could upgrade first.
Bitcoin and Energy
How much electricity Bitcoin uses, where it comes from, what the critics get right, and which common comparisons don't hold up.
Rat Poison, Tulips and a Pet Rock: Everything Bitcoin's Been Called (so far)
Bitcoin is dead, they said, and a Ponzi scheme, a tulip bubble, rat poison and money for drug dealers and terrorists. Every label, who said it and when, which ones can actually be scored, and what happened next, including the calls that held up and the ones our own side got wrong.